Historical memory is a potent weapon in fighting against the desert of organized forgetting and implies a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a reawakening of America's battered public memories.

Violence now becomes the only tool by which we can actually mediate social problems that should be dealt with in very different ways.

War has become a mode of sovereignty and rule, eroding the distinction between war and peace.

Job insecurity, debt servitude, poverty, incarceration and a growing network of real and symbolic violence have entrapped too many young people in a future that portends zero opportunities and zero hopes. This is a generation that has become the new register for disposability, redundancy, and new levels of surveillance and control.

Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability.

Where neoliberalism thrives is in having done something that we haven't seen before. There is a merging of culture, politics, and power under neoliberalism that's unprecedented. They control the cultural apparatuses. And what I mean by "cultural apparatuses" is all those institutions that are about the production of knowledge, values, dispositions, and subjectivities. They control them.

As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of violence, cruelty and disposability.